Center News and Notes

Privatizing public streams in New Mexico (barbed wire optional); the benefits of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone; the decline of part of the Ogalla aquifer slows; and other highlights of environmental news from around the West this week.

If federal plans move forward, most U.S. coastal waters would be open to offshore oil drilling. Stanford Professors Deborah Sivas and Alexandria Boehm look at related legal and marine issues from the perspective of the California coastline, which has been protected from new drilling since 1969.

In the federal government, wildfires have a lesser claim on disaster funds. As fires burn with greater magnitude and frequency, the cost of fighting them is increasingly borne by money earmarked for prevention.